1 mm fiber optic cable, the backbone of Zero Point One at ARTECHOUSE. Photo by Maria Helena Carey
If you’re looking for a fresh and awe-inspiring weekend activity, Naked Eyes by Nonotak, the latest exhibit from ARTECHOUSE may be the weekend stop you need–especially if it’ll continue to rain like this all weekend.
For those unfamiliar with ARTECHOUSE, it is a fresh and innovative museum space in Southwest DC that showcases pieces at the intersection between art and technology. Since their opening in the summer of 2017, the venue has housed a gamut of beautiful, dreamlike and magical pieces. For each incarnation, they completely transform an otherwise average space into a liminal expanse where letters float, leaves dance and your cocktail comes alive as you view it through your phone– using the ARTECHOUSE app and a little patience.
The latest exhibit, Naked Eyes, was created by a Paris-based artist duo called Nonotak. Noemi Schipfer, a visual artist, and Takami Nakamoto, a musician and architect, have been collaborating blending light in an indirect manner and combining it to music since 2011. Their latest installation, created specifically for the space, consists of four different pieces: The Ocean, Coma, Zero Point One and Baseline.
Each of the pieces is designed around LED lights and lasers used in different ways: Baseline, the first piece that greets you and which you are bound to see in most Instagrams soon, is a simple parallel grid whose designs change to the soundtrack in the room. If this sounds simplistic, you need to experience the wavelike hypnosis of seeing the floor move and the walls appear and disappear all around you.
The Ocean, a piece just off the main room, is more subtle, but no less dramatic. According to Lena Galperina, director of visitor experience at ARTECHOUSE, the lights are manipulated and molded so it’s the indirect light that makes patterns and moves in concentric circles that pulsate. Coma features spotlights in a dizzying, elegant, macabre dance. This is easily the most emotionally touching of the pieces.
Finally, Zero Point One is, according to Galperina, the artists’ attempt at making light a solid element without the assistance of a fog machine. Nestled in a small room after Coma, Zero Point One, named after the gauge of cable needed to assemble the piece (1 mm), is a hypnotic whirl of light that feels cosmic and futuristic even as you understand that it’s just the light, dancing at the will of two talented artists.
If you go:
WHAT: Naked Eyes by Nonotak
WHERE: ARTECHOUSE, 1238 Maryland Avenue SW
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. through June 30. For tickets, click here.